Tag: CRM

Microsoft seems to be back on a mini acquisition spree. It acquired a cloud storage vendor, StorSimple, earlier this week. Today, it made yet another small acquisition, a marketing software company called MarketingPilot. MarketingPilot makes automated marketing solutions which could be integrated with Microsoft’s own offerings like Dynamics CRM.

MarketingPilot offers an integrated marketing management solution for lead and advertisement buying management. It was apparently a quick acquisition and a rather small one.

While Microsoft continues to focus on the Windows 8 launch, it also works to improve its enterprise offerings, which form a major chunk of its overall revenue.

With Dynamics CRM, Microsoft competes with Oracle, SAP and Salesforce.com among others.

The Microsoft Dynamics CRM team continues to execute against a vision to help organizations better attract, retain, and grow their customers. Our goal is to deliver more compelling finished applications, modern user experiences with simplified user interfaces, and an open and extensible platform for Cloud and On-premise deployments.

With the explosion of new channels, emerging markets, and shifts to online and digital customer engagement, there’s tremendous opportunity ahead in the marketing automation space. In fact, according to IDC, “Marketing Automation is expected to grow faster than any other segment of CRM over the next 4 years,” and according to Gartner, “by 2017, CMOs may have a bigger IT budget than CIOs do.” More and more, marketers are being asked to drive the overall strategy and execution of customer interactions across multiple channels and touch points, and to measure ROI on those interactions.

As part of these industry trends and emerging business opportunities, I am excited to announce that Dynamics CRM has closed on the acquisition of MarketingPilot. MarketingPilot provides Integrated Marketing Management solutions that allow organizations to better understand their customers, manage and streamline marketing operations and create automated and measurable multi-channel marketing campaigns. This acquisition is a very exciting step forward for us, and will accelerate our ability to better meet the needs of CMO’s through rich business intelligence, and better enable marketers to successfully plan, execute, monitor, and optimize customer interactions across digital, social and traditional channels, and measure ROI.

Microsoft, along with our partners, has been helping marketing organizations for several years now. Customers like Volvo Construction Equipment and the Portland Trailblazers are using Microsoft Dynamics CRM today to better attract and retain their customers. We are committed to helping marketers plan, execute, monitor and optimize customer interactions across digital, social and traditional channels and measure the impact on revenue. With this acquisition, we believe we will be well positioned to deliver highly valuable marketing automation solutions to new and existing customers.

Please join me in welcoming MarketingPilot employees and customers to the Microsoft Business Solutions Division and the broader Microsoft family. At Convergence, this coming March, we will further describe our product vision in this area, including our plans with MarketingPilot.